I am a burglar. I began my career in burglary at the age of 12. I got caught once. I did ten years. I would still burgle but I'm just too old to do it any more.

So as I said, I began at 12. A neighbor, not right next door but down the street by a few houses, had asked a friend of a friend to mow their lawn while they were away for the summer. My friend told me that his friend was talking about burglarizing the place. My friend was 13 and his friend was 15. His friend wanted to sell the stuff to buy drugs with. My friend was toying with the idea but was too chicken shit. But my friend told me that his friend was planning to burgle the place in about two weeks. Now even at twelve I figured it's a pretty lame idea to victimize anyone you know. You will automatically be on the suspect list. Plus the kid had been in trouble with the law before and I don't think that neighbor knew about it. The neighbor in question didn't really know me though perhaps knew our family name perhaps from one of our other neighbors. In any case, astronomy being something I was interested in as a kid, I happen to know that we were about 4 days away from a new moon and that meant it would be nice and dark. So I figured on pre empting my friend's friend and so I made my own plans to break in.

This was a suburban neighborhood, developed roughly a century ago. Nobody's back yard was ever lit except when someone was having a late cookout. There were lots of trees and bushes and sheds and pools to hide behind while slinking from one yard to the next, especially a diminutive 12 year old. At first I wasn't sure how I was going to break in and I wasn't sure how I was going to see my way around. but as it happened the house was nicely shaded all around by over grown shrubs and trees and they had all the curtains closed. So I decided to just take a screw driver to jimmy the door with like I'd seen on police shows and a bag. Of course I wore cliche dark clothes and I was even smart enough to wear gloves. So on the appointed day I crept through several back yards, had to deal with only one small dog which was quieted with one of the dog biscuits I brought with me for that purpose.

I made it to the house and found I didn't need any burglary tools at all. They left a basement window open. And they left a light on. At first I thought someone was already there or even perhaps home and I had my info wrong but after scouting the place out for a few minutes I confirmed nobody was there and they probably just forgot and left the basement light on. That was a big plus since the window I went in was the only window for the whole basement and nobody could see it unless you were in the yard right at the window. It was otherwise completely obscured by bushes and a short fence.

The basement was loaded with all sorts of things that might interest a 12 year old boy. There were tons of tool, trunks with old junk, antiques etc. in them. I found a stash of porn in a box under the work bench. That was the first porn I'd ever seen. Some of it today would be illegal. There were a few black and white magazines showing kids having sex. But to a 12 year old in 1961, they were all amazing. Most of the rest were very tame by today's standards. So I put that in a pile by the bench under the window and continued exploring. I found a jar of old coins on another bench. It was a mixture of buffalo nickels, Indian cents and silver dimes, quarters and halves. But it was mostly nickels and cents. That too went with my pile of loot. So I looked around and as much as I liked a lot of the tools and wanted them, I realized that I would need to pick and choose as I expected I would probably only get to make one trip back through the neighbor's yards.

There really wasn't anything else but what I considered junk in the basement so I decided to explore upstairs. The top of the stairs was dark so I couldn't really see very well even with the basement light on but I made my way upstairs anyways. That is when I found the door was some how latched. The door knob itself worked but I there was some sort of latch on the other side. I knew from the absolute silence in the house that it was still empty other than myself so I wasn't worried too much about noises that could be heard from within the house so I shook the door really hard and finally the latch came free. It was one of those cheap hook type latches that lots of people use to secure a door when they are too cheap to use a good deadbolt. Besides, who really expects to have someone break into the first floor from the basement?

Anyway, it gave with some effort as I said and I started to explore the first floor. The kitchen was the first room. It had lots of old dishes and stuff like you would expect. The fridge was empty and it's door was wide open. I was kind of looking forward to a snack. There were lots of canned goods, warm bottles of soda, jars of stuff but really nothing one could make an appealing snack out of. So I went to explore the next room which was the dining room. They had an old china cabinet filled with old china. Not interesting to a 12 year old though looking back I should have grabbed some of what was there because I think some of it was valuable even then. I did find a wood box with silver ware in it but again, to a kid, not that appealing. Plus silver wasn't worth as much then as it is now. Yes at 12 I recognized that silver did have value but just not what I was looking for though honestly I didn't know for sure what I was looking for.

The living room had a TV in it. It was one of those big tube TV's from the 1950's. It was round on the sides but flat across the top and the cabinet was big and made of mahogany. It had rabbit ears for an antenna and only 12 channels. It was almost exactly like the one we had except with a small screen and ours was slightly newer and we had an antenna on the roof so we probably got better reception. There was a very old record player but it was also way too big to take. There were book cases on one wall and some furniture and nic-nacs and that was about it for the living room. The living room closet only had some old coats, hats and boots and a couple of umbrellas.

So upstairs I went to continue my explorations. While I could see fairly well in the first floor by only putting on a couple of dim lights, the second floor had windows exposed to the street. Luckily that also meant they were fairly well lit up by the street lights so I could explore without putting on any lights and that would most likely have been noticed by any neighbors who might be watching the place.

There were only two rooms and a bathroom on the second floor. There was nothing interesting in the bathroom. They obviously did all their laundry before they left because even the hamper was empty. The spare bedroom had a small twin bed, some bedding and a sewing machine and boxes of sewing stuff. Again, not interesting to a 12 year old burglar. I was hoping the master bedroom would have some treasure. I found the old lady's jewelry box and opened it up and found I had a hard time seeing the contents so I took them over to the closet where luckily there was a light. So I went in and closed the door and turned on the light and looked inside. I didn't know if it was real or fake but I found a couple of rings that looked like gold and looked like wedding bands. There were earrings and necklaces and rings that had what looked like giant diamonds. I didn't know anything about jewelry but I did know that if it was big and a real diamond that meant it had to be very valuable and that would mean these people had to be really wealthy. I had an uncle that was wealthy. He had a huge nice house with lots of really nice things. These people were not especially better off than we were so I figured the jewelry had to be mostly fake. I did take a couple of nice pairs of earrings and the prettiest brooch and the prettiest necklace and all the rings though since they were small. I also found what looked a lot like my father's class ring and I remember my Dad saying his was made of 12k gold so I figured I might as well take that too. There were a couple of military medals that looked interesting and a really old odd looking coin. Then I opened up a small drawer inside and found it packed with two dollar bills. I figured I hit the jackpot so I took all of those. I closed up the Jewelry box and was about to turn off the light when I saw it. Real treasure. While I was looking down into the jewelry box I was only focused on that. Had I focused lower I would have seen the cardboard box that said "GRANDPA JOHNSON'S COIN COLLECTION"

I put the jewelry box back as neatly as I could figuring that if I did my burglarizing carefully and did like they taught us in Boy Scouts and left things as close to the way I found them as possible, that it would maybe take them a while to figure out they had been burglarized and that might confuse them as to when they were burglarized. I focused in on the coin collection and dragged it out into the middle of the room. It was heavy, very heavy. It must have weighed at least 30 lbs which was heavy for little old me. Inside there were binders and folders and little boxes all filled with old coins. I wanted to look at them carefully but even the light in the closet was too dim to get a good look so I dragged the whole thing into the basement where the light was strong and nobody would notice what I was doing' I set it all up on a bench and went through it. I didn't know a lot about coins other than the older and rarer they were the more valuable they probably were. Most of it was silver. Most were silver dollars. Some had dates going back to the 1700's. I figured I'd hit the jackpot. This was what I came here for. The only problem was there was no way I could drag it all home in one trip. It was just too much. My pockets were already filled with the jewelry and $2 bills I found and my priority, as a 12 year old was the stash of porn. Still, I wanted to find out what else they had in that old bedroom. So back up I went and ransacked the closet, without opening the door or being too messy. They didn't have that much. Mostly old clothes, boxes of uninteresting papers, an old chess set that looked like nobody played in years. I went through all the drawers of the two dressers and the vanity and found mostly clothes, something that looked like a penis that was made of had plastic but way bigger than mine, a box of condoms and bottles of liquor. That was in the old lady's dresser. In the old guy's dresser much the same except I found an old pocket watch with a chain and I liked that so in my pocket it went. That was about it other than what to me was worthless junk.

I had resigned myself to the fact that I wanted all my loot and not just a few pieces that I could carry in one trip. So I piled it all up on the bench together and then pushed what I figured I could carry in the first trip, out the window first. Then out I went. I put the best looking magazines, a few folders with silver dollars in it and the jar of coins in my bag and I slinked my way back home. When I got home I checked the kitchen clock and it was still fairly early. I was so glad my parents trusted me without a baby sitter. I wasn't expecting them until after midnight.

I piled my loot in my own bedroom closet behind a box and went out for trip number two. It took four trips all together and that last trip was the only one that was really scary. A neighbor between my house and my target's house opened their back door and turned on a light and was looking around like they thought they saw or heard something while I hid behind a bush and froze hoping they didn't have either a gun or a dog. The scare only lasted a minute and they were inside again and the light was off again and that was that. I was home a few minutes later. All together my first burglary job took about three hours. I was slow and methodical. I very carefully put everything back in it's place as well as I could. The jewelry box was kind of messy when I found it so I figured as long as they didn't actually search for any of the things I took it would be a while before they noticed. I carried the box that had held the coins in it back upstairs and filled them with a few bricks and closed the lid. I know that wouldn't fool anyone who tried to open the box but maybe if they just moved it around they would not notice the difference. I closed drawers and doors neatly and moved things back the way I found them except what I took. I figured there was no way they would report the porn was missing so I had no concern about that. My only real concern was that my mother might find my loot as she did like to clean my room way too thoroughly and way too frequently.

We lived in a fairly old house. It had been built a little after the civil war I think. In my bedroom there were two closets. One was near the door to my room and the other was at the other end and was kind of short and small and built up under the eves. That was the best place since it had spiders, or so my Mom thought and she hated spiders. So that was going to be my hidy hole. As it happened in that part of the roof a chimney went and I could reach around behind it. That was the best spot, under some boards. Then in the coming weeks I would take out my loot and take mental inventory of what I had.

Over the next several days I was a little nervous but not too much. As time went by I felt more comfortable that I got away with it. The following weekend when my parents went out again I took out my loot and looked through it. First came the porn. There was a photo of an eleven year old girl who was kissing an adult woman on the mouth while the girl was being fucked by a man. The caption read "Mommy and Daddy teach Jane where babies come from." That was the very first image I ever jerked off to. I wore that page of that magazine out to the point where it was like tissue paper lace. I think the first 300 times I came were the result of wishing Mommy and Daddy taught me how to fuck Jane whoever Jane was. Jane by the way, despite being flat chested, hairless and only eleven, looked an awful lot like a preteen Betty Page who I had no idea about until many years later.

After that first masturbatory session enhanced with porn (all the previous sessions had been limited to a mental image of one of the girls in my schools, no particular girl, just any I had some sort of contact with that day though Mary Janson was very popular in my fantasies. She had just recently started to grow boobs and I figured they were going to get pretty big based on what her older sister and mom looked like.) I went through the coins. Like I said, mostly it was old silver dollars. All had an eagle of one design or other. All were shiny like they were made yesterday. There were silver halves and quarters and dimes and there were nickels and pennies and two and three cent coins that I had never even heard of. The oldest one was a big copper coin that I could barely read. It looked like the worn face of a woman with a crown and the date 1799. I could barely read the date. I figured that had to be worth something. There was also some paper money but way over size and really old looking. One had an Indian on it that I thought couldn't be real money. Then I found a couple of boxes at the bottom. They weren't very big so I figured they couldn't have much in them. I opened one up and in it were a bunch of little white envelopes. I opened one and out fell a small gold color coin and it was really shiny like it was made yesterday like the other coins were. It just said "unc" on the envelope. In fact all the little envelopes all said "unc" on them which I later found out was a coin collector abbreviation for "uncirculated." They were gold coins. There were exactly sixty four of them. I could hardly believe they were real.

I put my loot back in my hiding place, all but the porn, and locked it up. I spread the porn out on the bed. I had taken it all without really looking at every magazine, loose photo and book. It wasn't really a huge pile. But to me it was a treasure trove. There was a book in French that had photos that looked like an encyclopedia of sex and perversion. It had hundreds of photos and diagrams. Everything from a photo of a little girl holding an adult man's erect penis to a photo of several fat old men in a gay orgy to medical diagrams showing the reproductive system of both genders, cross sections of a pregnant belly and the unborn baby inside, diagrams of different types of artificial penises and photos of condoms, various positions, a photo of two woman masturbating each other, a photo of two boys, one about my age and one about four who were making out, a photo of a woman jerking off a horse and a photo of a man pooping into the wide open mouth of a teenage girl and hundreds of others all just as bizarre. I really wish I could read French. Mostly I liked the photos of girls my age and a little older and of course women with really big boobs. There was one magazine that was all photos of naked men. That was going in the trash, except I was afraid my parents would find it if I put it out so I tore it up into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet. I was less concerned about the other stuff but somehow an entire book devoted to photos of naked men doing nasty things to each other was NOT what I wanted my mom to find.

The weeks went by, the summer went by and according to my friend, his friend chickened out and decided not to burgle the place after all. Finally the old couple got home from their summer long vacation to wherever they got off to and came home. I was carefully and discretely watching for them and listening for news of their return so I could be very carefully prepared in case I had to find a better hiding place or ditch the loot somewhere. The police never came. They never even came to their house. A couple of weeks after they got home from their vacation my mom told me that the old guy got into a car accident and was killed. The old lady was then put into an old folks home and right after that the house went up for sale. I never heard anything from any neighbor or the usual gr**evine about the place having been burgled. I felt completely at ease and comfortable and relaxed about the whole affair as soon as the house was sold. After that, I figured anyone who might miss any of that loot would be long gone.

Eventually, over the years I wore out that collection of porn. I kept all the loot for several years until it was time to buy my first car. I borrowed a book on coins from the library and found out that the most valuable coin I had was an old penny from the very early 1800's. I thought for sure the gold coins would be worth more but that old penny was worth $2000. That got me a really nice almost new Ford in really good condition with few miles. I told my parents that I worked out a deal with the seller and would be making payments from my "job." I had lied to my parents about having a job. Unless you want to call burglary a job.

So what did I do between the age of 12 and 16? I burgled of course. So this first heist was what got me hooked. There was the thrill, the danger, the fun of the hunt and of course the pay off. I eventually sold everything except the porn. Most of the jewelry was junk including the watch which I kept as a souvenir. Nearly all the value was in the coins and I eventually made a few thousand from selling them off one at a time over the years. I did really well with it in the 1980's when gold prices shot up. I still had over 40 gold coins at that time.

My next burglary didn't happen until the next Christmas vacation. I was still 12 and heard through the school gr**evine that a particular family across town was going to Florida for the entire two week vacation and then another week on top of that. I wasn't sure how I was going to pull it off until I heard about a paper route becoming available and so I figured that since paper boys had to deliver early in the morning I might get away with dragging a wagon down the street with bundles of stuff covered in rolls of newspapers and nobody would suspect anything. So I became a fixture in the neighborhood by the first week of December and by Christmas vacation people were used to seeing me pull a red wagon through the neighborhood filled with newspapers. That worked out fairly well. I timed my burglary to coincide with my parents being away for an overnight weekend which happened again near a new moon so it was especially dark. I had a flashlight with me and both of my canvas newspaper bags. I also had my Boy Scout knife with me. Did I mention I was a Boy Scout? Who would suspect a 12 year old boy with those "burglary tools?"

Discretely I strolled up their driveway, around back and to my delight found the kitchen window unlocked and a ladder up against the house. That was very considerate of them. Again this particular house was in the suburbs and there were lots of trees and bushes and stuff around and there was a street light out front so that illuminated my project. I won't bore you with the details but suffice to say I found about $30 in cash ( a lot in 1961) about $3 in loose change, a purple heart, my first copy of Playboy (I jerked off to Miss November, initials D.D., how appropriate?), and another old pocket watch. Definitely worth the trouble but not nearly as big a treasure trove as that first one. Again, I wished I had taken the silver ware they had. Today I bet it would fetch a pretty penny. But that was not all I took. As I said, this house belonged to a family. I explored the boy's room first. He was a year or two older than me though I wasn't sure exactly how old. I just knew he wasn't in my grade. He had the usual teenage boy stuff in his room, some of which I already had, some I didn't and wanted but it would be too much to carry. But he had three things I took. He had a bunch of old baseball cards held together with a rubber band. He had about 40 old Super Man comic books and he had an old beat up looking baseball with an old autograph on it that I couldn't make out. I figured it might be someone famous so that's why I took the ball. I had already read the newer half of his Superman Comics before so I only took the older ones that I hadn't read. He had a lot of sports equipment, his own record player and a radio that I wanted really badly but all of it was too much to carry. I had to pick and choose. Next was the girl. She was younger than me. I didn't know her age but I had seen her. I figured she was about ten. She had the usual preteen girl junk that no 12 year old boy would be interested in. But she had one thing I definitely was interested in but didn't know until I saw it, a pair of worn panties that were sitting in an almost empty hamper in her room. I picked it up and smelled it and took that with me. Finally I raided the fridge. Well not really raid so much as found one item in the freezer that was wrapped in foil and guessed correctly that it might be lasagna. So I took my loot and filled my wagon and covered them with the give away papers I always got to drum up more business and strolled casually home. As soon as I was half way home I realized I should have grabbed Mrs. Burglary Victim's worn panties as well.

The money I eventually spent but not all at once. The comic books I read and found out years later that only one was worth any money and not a lot. I think in mint condition that one is now worth about $25. But it wasn't in mint condition. The baseball cards were never worth that much but I added them to my collection, eventually. The panties belonging to the ten year old girl were priceless. I think I sniffed them dry.